


Noxious Dreams

by CommonMolly



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cthulhu Mythos Fusion, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Nightmares, POV Third Person Omniscient, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26116885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommonMolly/pseuds/CommonMolly
Summary: Once a pilot bares her soul to her drift partner, she bares it to everything else, too - including the Old Ones and their dreams.
Relationships: Raleigh Becket & Mako Mori
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Crossworks 2020





	Noxious Dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Starrie_Wolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starrie_Wolf/gifts).



They wake in the same instant: the Jaeger-widow Raleigh Beckett and the Jaeger-heir Mako Mori. They wake in the dark, each alone in their separate quarters, their chests heaving and hearts racing, their minds mired still in the prophet-dreams that woke them.

If it were Raleigh alone, he’d lie there on a flat pallet built for economy and not for comfort, and new dream-horrors would bleed into old memories until there was no distinguishing them. He’d weep all unawares, caught in the tidewash, and eventually sorror and horror together would drive him to unconsciousness. It happened often enough after Yancy died; it got worse when Raleigh took the job working on the Wall. It was the proximity to the ocean, he figured, and yet he couldn’t bear to be any farther from it—from the place where he lost Yancy. Sometimes he thought his tears must be seawater, and his blood, too.

But they are two now, widow and heir, and Mako has no past grief to tow her under. She has only Raleigh: an anchor, not a riptide. Once she catches her breath, Mako rises from her own thin pallet and crosses the aisle that separates them. She raps her knuckles against his door.

Even when he answers he doesn’t look fully awake, our fallen-risen hero. “What?” he asks. Is there something wrong, he wonders? Was there an alarm he didn’t hear?

“You dreamed it, too,” she says.

Raleigh doesn’t understand at first.

“The city,” she says. “The black prisms, and the slime, and—” Her father trained her well; she does not speak the name aloud, though its inhuman syllables clog her throat like phlegm. “—and the sleeper.”

“Yeah,” Raleigh says, hoarse. 

“I read the accounts, and I listened to the pilots speak of it in the mess, but I was not prepared.” She confesses it like a weakness. 

“Welcome to the Jaeger corps,” Raleigh says, his smile sickly with the residue of noxious dreams.

This was the thing the engineers didn’t realize when they built the first Jaeger and joined its pilots: the drift was not only some scientific miracle of neural impulses and electrochemical signals. The drift was the meeting of souls, and once one pilot bared her soul to another, she bared her soul to all. In his waking hours, a Jaeger pilot fights the sleepers rising from the deep. And when he sleeps, the sleepers drags him down into the depths and holds him there. 

Sometimes, he drowns. It’s not unheard of for the drift-dreams of sunken R’lyeh to drive a vulnerable pilot insane. The psychologists test potential pilots for that now, or at least they claim to, an expression of the irrepressible optimism of mankind.

They stand there still, Raleigh in his doorway, Mako holding her arms as tightly as she holds her sanity. What they should do, Raleigh and his drift-wife, Mako and her fallen-risen hero, is go to the mess and find something to fill their bellies with. Few horrors of the deep have ever persevered long against simple bodily comforts. Also, eating together violates no regulations.

In fact, what Raleigh does is step aside and say, “You want to come in?”

His quarters look like hers. There are no surprises here, and no more personal trinkets than Mako keeps herself. She brushes her fingers over his sweater, thick and cable-knit and lightly pilled. She palms his wall as if she might discover some mystery there, but it’s the same cool metal as her own. These are the small facts of concrete reality she grounds herself in. There is no monstrous sleeper here. There is no vast, indescribable city except for the one looming still in her mind.

Really, the only difference of any note is that unlike her quarters, these have Raleigh in them. He watches her make her discoveries; he watches her approach until she is only inches away, her eyes still full of the broken geometry of the sunken place, R’Lyeh. He puts his arms around her—cautious, uncertain, unable to remember the last person he embraced—and pulls her flush against him. She holds herself so still. Only the smallest trembles escape. She pressed his face to his neck and breathes unsteadily on his skin.

They stand there for a while, breathing each other’s air, remembering each other’s dreams, until they remember instead that they have only a few hours until morning. “You could stay,” Raleigh says.

This is not according to regulation: they stretch out on the bunk with Mako’s face to Raleigh’s chest and Raleigh’s arm wrapped around her shoulders. They’ve flipped the light switch. The room is as dark as when they dreamed, but it’s not so cold now that they’re together. “Tell me what it’s like to kill an Old One,” Mako whispers.

She knows as well as he that calling it _killing_ is another of those expressions of human optimism. Are the Old Ones they fight ended or only dispersed? Will Jaegers do battle against the same ones, time and time again, until the stars go dark?

That’s for scientists and prophets to determine, for commanders to worry about. Here, now, Raleigh says, “The first one we fought was off the Aleutians. There’s not much out there, you know, mostly volcanoes. No one’d get hurt if we fucked up and needed backup. It was one of the smaller ones, about Statue of Liberty sized, and it kind of had a face like a squid bouquet…”

The Old Ones fight with horror. Rational thought splits against them like a log splits under an axe. Some minds are more susceptible than others; the optimistic psychologists test for that, too, now. But Jaeger pilots fight with weapons, with rockets precisely launched and enormous blades swung like scythes. Journalists and popular philosophers like to call it the triumph of the mundane.

Raleigh calls it other, cruder things, reducing horror to vulgarity, like so many soldiers before him. His voice rises and falls with the rhythm of his story, telling of blows struck, of wounds delivered that bubbled with gouts of green-black blood. He tells of his fallen, never-risen brother. For the first time in years his voice doesn’t hitch when he says Yancy’s name; he doesn’t notice. He tells of the noble battle, and when he finishes at last, narrating the vision of the dismembered Old One oozing into the sea, he finds that Mako is asleep.

They curl together on the thin pallet, Jaeger-widow and Jaeger-heir. Tomorrow they’ll rise and battle for mankind’s sanity. Tonight, for a little while, only peace washes up on the shores of sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Never forget that the sailors in the original Cthulhu story deal with the monster by ramming their boat into it, Little Mermaid style.


End file.
